Which HTTP Errors Should Be Custom Handled?

Question

In my web site, I am currently custom handling two HTTP errors: 404 Not Found and 403 Forbidden. This "handling" consists of redirecting the user to a custom error page specific to the particular error. Are there any other HTTP (or, in fact, other kinds) errors that occur often enough to warrant a custom redirect and page?

Answer 1

I would handle the 500 error page to be more friendly, like Stackoverflow does: http://stackoverflow.com/error

Answer 2

If you want to be relatively thorough, you can consider handling these two:

• 401: Unauthorized. You didn't recognize the login attempt. (Contrast with 403, where they do authenticate successfully but don't have permission to see the resource they asked for.)

• 500: Server Error. Something went wrong server-side and you couldn't recover from it.

If you expect to get a lot of traffic, perhaps also consider handling 503:

• 503: Service Unavailable. The server got your request but is too busy to handle it right now.

Answer 3

I'm using ruby on rails and by default it helps you handling these:

• 404: Not found

• 422: Unprocessable Entity

• 500: Server error

I then usually add handling for 403: Forbdiden